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12 days of crafting: finger-knitted yarn garland

From December 1-12, I’ll be blogging about some of my favorite crafting methods and projects. Hopefully you will be inspired to craft some Christmas gifts or handmade decor for your own home!

Day 8: Finger-Knitted Yarn Garland

You will need:

yarn

your fingers

That’s all!

Finger-knitting isn’t all that hard, but it’s probably easiest learned in person… Nevertheless, I took a few photos of the process, so hopefully you can figure it out! I used the 3-finger method; you can also do it with 2 or 4 fingers – the size of the garland will change accordingly!

Step 1: Take the end (tail) of your yarn and hold it between your thumb and hand (I leave about 6 inches in case I need it to hang the garland later). Then weave your yarn under your middle finger, over the ring finger and under your pinky.

Step 3: Now take the yarn and wrap it under all three fingers and back over the top of all three.

Step 4: Hanging onto the yarn behind your hand, you’ll go back to your pinky and bring the bottom loop up over the top one, and completely over your finger. Do the same with the next two fingers. In the photo above, the pinky is done, the ring finger is in process, and the middle finger has yet to be done.

Now just repeat steps 3 and 4!

After 6 or 7 rounds, take a look at the chain forming behind your hand. It will probably look a little funky, like this:

Let go of the tail and bring it behind your hand. Give it a good tug so that the stitches even out and look more like this:

Now you don’t have to hold onto the tail, so that makes it a little easier. Just keep knitting away…

…until you have the length you want! To finish it off, cut the yarn and bring it through the three loops your fingers were in, and pull tight.

Those garlands took about a half hour each. I love this method of making garlands – no tools required!

If you need more instruction, you can always search youtube for how-to videos. Happy finger-knitting!

I-cord stands for “idiot cord” because it’s that simple. You put three stitches on a double-pointed needle, knit all three, and pull the yarn around the back so that the stitches come together to make a tube. It’s good for garlands, or fun trim on sweaters, or those little chains old ladies use to keep their glasses around their necks, etc.

What I really can’t believe is that you haven’t picked up knitting yet. Compared to mosaics, it’s quite simple! On the other hand, this means that we won’t be running out of gifts for each other as long as we’re not doing the same crafts 🙂